Tag Archives: kodansha

Review: Attack on Titan, Vol. 1

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Attack on Titan, written and illustrated by Hajime Isayama
Publisher: Kodansha Comics
Genre: Shonen/Speculative Fiction/Horror/
|208 pgs|$10.99 USA| $11.99 CDN|
ISBN-13: 978-1-61262-024-4

I have been lucky in my reading that I rarely come across things I actively hate. Sure, I have had a few instances (Sasameke comes to mind) but the stuff I don’t like I just don’t like, and there are no hard feelings. But there are times when I consider a new title to add to the “shit list,” and unfortunately, Attack on Titan is one of those times.

At the core of Attack on Titan is a futuristic version of the Earth where the human race has been driven nearly to extinction by a race of giant monsters called Titans. These creatures seem only to exist to devour human beings. Humanity has responded to these alien creatures by building a giant walled city to protect themselves, and created an elite group of fighters who protect the human race by using retrofuturistic grappling hooks and natural gas to propel themselves through the air and kill Titans. As far as end of the world stories go, it’s a fairly original premise.

While the premise is original, the execution in Attack on Titan is poor. The tone of the dialogue is always some flavor of “I’m so scared/I’m the best patriot/We are all going to die/I’m the best fighter” that the writing flows together in a monotonous mess. Indeed, the entire driving force of the story of Attack on Titan is a mawkish “patriotism vs. individuality” argument. The humor and mystery that Isayama attempts to weave into the book do nothing to dispatch the overwhelming sense of fruitless angst and horror that  permeates the book. The ending of the first volume is even more underwhelming, building  an entire team of characters only to kill them all off at the end – not that I was expecting anything less. The question remains though – why kill off your main character after 1 volume?

Not horrifying – just miserable. From Attack on Titan, Vol. 1

The misery of the story of Attack on Titan is fueled by sketchy, dark art. Isayama uses an abundance of cross-hatching and thick black shading lines that blur faces and make action scenes incomprehensible. What Attack on TItan could have really used was a couple of packs of grey screen tone – it would have made flaws in the art such as improbable posturing and odd arm and leg lengths much less glaringly visible. Eyes are also not Isayama’s strong suit – they are either white circles, almost haunted-looking, or dark black circles – these can be with or without straight shading lines drawn down over a person’s face. Needless to say, it is at times hard to read characters and their projected emotions without Isayama forcing them to say “I’m so scared!” The style is certainly gritty, and I suspect that is part of the point, but I feel the style accentuates flaws and makes the entire comic much harder to read.

I really don’t have a problem with the violence or the pessimism of Attack on Titan. My main issue is how shoddily the whole book is done. Bakurano: Ours is a similar piece of fiction, heavy with the weight of death. But where Bakurano gives each of its characters the stage of death in which to tell his or her life, Attack on Titan is a veritable slaughtering, and without regard to the expectations of the reader. Killing off the main character, the only character you have allowed the reader to connect with, seems fruitless. Perhaps volume 1 of Attack on Titan just ends in a bad spot for the story… but I wouldn’t be able to tell, since there’s no chance I will be reading future volumes.

For Fans of: Bokurano: Ours, Gantz, incomprehensible bloody messes
Verdict: Not Recommended

Review: Mardock Scramble, Vol. 1

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When Kodansha Comics popped onto the scene, replacing Del Rey and making huge plans for increased frequency of releases and new series making it to print, I was fairly excited. Obviously it was upsetting that Del Rey had mostly been cut from the picture, but it was my hope that this change would lead to some great new content being released. For the most part, I have been underwhelmed, due in large part to the fact that I am not the average manga consumer, and I still don’t have new volumes of Nodame Cantibile (which, face it, is a lost cause).

Kodansha has made a lot of safe bets with the titles it is currently publishing (besides the ever-befuddling Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei!) and one of these safe bets is Mardock Scramble, a manga based of a 700-page “cyber punk noir thriller” novel recently published in English by Viz Media‘s Haikasoru imprint. Importantly, both the manga and book were written by the same person, so the hope is that the transition from novel to illustration would at least be faithful to the original book. I had all but decided not to purchase the title when a few bloggers I follow fairly closely said that it was a fun read – so I decided to bite.

Mardock Scramble follows a young girl named Rune Balot (the most irritating name for a protagonist ever) who has been forced into prostitution and is inexplicably found, revitalized, and subsequently murdered by a man named Shell. Rune, in the hands of the reaper, is saved by two private detectives, Dr. Easter, and a shape-shifting weapon that calls itself Oeufcoque and takes the form of a yellow mouse. She is saved by a mostly illegal experimental procedure called “Mardock Scramble 09″ (yes, I realize this gets more ridiculous as I type), and now has the power to interface with all manner of electronic devices. The main focus of this first novel is whether Rune feels that her new life is worth living, after being broken down so thoroughly by her past, or if she should help Dr. Easter and Oeufcoque deliver Shell to justice.

If I had to describe Mardock Scramble in one word, that word would be “fluffy,” which is an odd word for describing a gritty sci-fi action thriller like Mardock Scramble. We see Rune run through the ringer, only to be brought back to life and made into some sort of superhuman weapon, and it’s all very cheery and “wow, look at how much power she has,” in a typical shonen way. Rune is a victim of poor circumstance, and her trials and tribulations are laid out to give her excuses to do certain things, but the pain or the sadness is very gimmicky. As a reader, I want well developed characters to go with my action, and Rune is a few clichés pasted onto a black-haired girl. The content of Mardock Scramble takes a backseat to cool explosions and artistic flourishes, and while that can be entertaining, it certainly isn’t compelling. It is this “style over substance,” storytelling that turns me off to works like Mardock Scramble.

To add to that mix, Rune is a doormat character, and her trauma and sadness are not well explained, so she ends up looking like a broken doll rather than a person battling with depression and issues of self-worth. The book is so busy with its upgrades that it essentially overrides Rune’s emotional crisis after a few short scenes. The other main character, Oeufcoque the mouse/weapon, is played as both comic relief and a Yoda-like benevolent teacher, leading Rune through her problems while enjoying a good pistachio. It’s not really clear what roll Oeufcoque and his friend, Dr. Easter, play in this series, but they break the action up a little bit, and that’s a welcome change from the rest of this first volume.

The art of Mardock Scramble is fairly well done, but there’s an unpolished feel to it that nags at me. The style, which is grungy, a little dirty, and futuristic, hits the right tone for the story, but there are some inconsistencies with the way people are drawn (faces with misaligned eyes, abnormally long arms and legs) that seem to get less and less noticeable as you progress through the book. Page layouts in Mardock Scramble are excellent in comparison to other books in the same genre, and Mardock Scramble reads very easily because of it. If anything is this book’s saving grace, it is that it is a quick, well composed read, so unless you are looking specifically to evaluate the work in a critical, some of the misgivings I have about it may be easily overlooked.

Overall, I think Mardock Scramble will be a great read for teens who like action and sci-fi, but I think those who are looking for a bit of manga popcorn to munch on will like Mardock Scramble the most. For my tastes, I want Mardock Scramble to have more substance than it currently has. This may change in the second volume, but from the parting scenes of volume one, I would have to sit through another chase scene, and to be honest, I have seen enough of those to last a lifetime. While Mardock Scramble isn’t the worst work I have read in the genre, and certainly manages to get the pacing and flow of reading absolutely right, I doubt I will be back for volume 2.

Love Hina MMF: It Gets Better

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Love Hina is a series that has, and for a long time, been a part of my background as a member of the manga fandom. It was one of the first series I read compulsively, and during a family vacation, instead of waiting a week for books I had reserved on inter-library loan to finish the series (volumes 13 and 14) I instead stopped by a local bookstore in a town I knew nothing about to buy them and find out – what happens to Keitaro and Naru?

In some ways, Love Hina and I have had a sort of tumultuous relationship. At first, I absolutely loved the series, and devoured the series published by TokyoPop. This would have been 2005, I think, so the series had recently finished publication in the USA, so it was fairly easy to find the books. Later, I purchased the entire series on eBay, and read it again, and was torn. What was the reason I liked this series, I wondered. It didn’t seem to have the same charm as it did in the first read, and I grew impatient with the stalling and bickering between the two main characters.

And then, to my great pleasure, I have had the chance to review the Love Hina omnibus released by Kodansha Comics, which has really revitalized the series with a brand new translation and a book that reads crisply and has great art. Looking at the differences between the TokyoPop edition and the Kodansha edition, it is a night and day difference in image quality. Kodansha clearly trumps the old TokyoPop versions, and it’s a cleaner and much more vibrant book. The translations are much more focused and the lettering is very clean and certainly unlike TokyoPop‘s original print run. It is obvious that whoever put this project together loves this comic, and wanted to see it released in style.

While I was reading through this new version of Love Hina, I remembered in a flash what had enamored me to it so nearly 7 years ago; like another series I had recently started reading, Harry Potter, Love Hina tried to show me that if you try hard enough, if you want something bad enough, if you work and dedicate yourself to that thing, you can obtain it. For Harry, it was resolution and the ability to become a great wizard. For Keitaro, it was an education and a wife.

When I was reading Love Hina in the summer of 2005, I had recently just resolved a really sour relationship. It had changed how I thought about relationships and my future, and now, looking back on that time in my life, I can see that I was much more depressed than I think I let myself believe, and certainly shaken to the core. I did not think that I could go through a relationship again if that was the end result of being with other people.

But, I began reading Love Hina, and found myself re-evaluating my problems. I could project them onto Keitaro (that poor bastard, he has enough problems without mine to deal with), and escape into the lovely world of the Hinata Inn. Keitaro was my proxy, and I found myself rooting for him as if I were encouraging myself to do better as I moved into the next phase of my life.

I know that Love Hina doesn’t have this deep meaning or strong themes to criticize and analyze – but sometimes, that isn’t the point. The point is to empathize and care about the results of the story, to connect, to project, and to become, if only for a moment, a character of another world. I think that is why Love Hina is a series that deserved its own MMF.

I took plenty away from Love Hina, but the most important thing that Keitaro and the girls of Love Hina taught me is that things get better. We can’t always expect life to be sunshine and roses, and there will be strange circumstances and odd coincidences that ruin your day or make you feel like your back is up against the world. You may not be able to have a high quality relationship with the person or people you care about. And that is part of life. Keitaro taught me that we make our own way, one bumbling step at a time, and if we fall, the thing that matters most is that we stand back up.

My Experiences with Sailor Moon

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Instead of looking at an unlicensed series this week, I thought I might switch gears a bit and talk about Kodansha’s recent announcement that they are re-releasing Sailor Moon.

My relationship with Sailor Moon starts, believe it or not, when I was six years old. The local FOX channel, at 6AM, showed the Sailor Moon anime, before Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers and the Garfield cartoon show. At the time, I didn’t know anything about anime or manga – it was still years away from when Viz Media and other publishers would begin publishing manga in the USA.

I have come to learn that this anime was licensed in order to capitalize on the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers fad, and was a very heavily edited and re-scripted version of the first two seasons of the Japanese show. At the time, I remember thinking that it was a fun show, but I wasn’t as obsessed with it as my twin brother, who would drag me out of bed in the morning to watch it. We both liked it better than the Power Rangers, him most likely for the fight scenes, and me, most likely for… well, the fight scenes. The fights in Sailor Moon were cool! They were bright and flashy, and they captured my imagination as a 1st grader.

My second run-in with Sailor Moon came when I worked as a youth librarian for the Fairfield County District Library before college. At that time, the library had started to get into the manga craze. It had picked up a few books from this publisher called Mixx Entertainment (which would eventually become TokyoPop), and had some of the Mixx Pocket editions of Sailor Moon. I remember them distinctly because they were some of the hottest books in the youth collection – they were always on hold, checked out, and I know we replaced them at least once due to wear and tear. I looked through them a time or two, but never managed to sit down and read the content. The names were all familiar from the show, but the books were just not something I was into at the time, so I let them go. Sadly, when I went back to try and read them a few years ago, they had long since been destroyed by loving fans.

Kodansha has made more than a few people happy with the announcement of the rerelease of Sailor Moon. The series is nestled in a nostalgia of a simpler fandom, when many aging otaku were in college or high school – it probably rings quite a few bells. Still, even for those of us who weren’t reading manga when Mixx was printing copies of Sailor Moon, the rerelease of this series gives new readers a chance to experience what many fans consider a classic for the genre. It is a fun and exciting time to be a manga reader these days; just make sure you go out and buy yourself a copy when Kodansha releases the first omnibused volume in September of 2011.

What experiences have you had with Sailor Moon and the Sailor Scouts? Did you watch the anime as a kid, or read the manga? Are you a first-time reader? I would love to hear your experiences in the comments.

Talking Points: What Were Your Vertical License Requests?

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This week, Ed Chavez, community liaison and marketing guru for Vertical Inc. announced that he was taking suggestions for licenses. This isn’t a joke. Vertical really wants to know what you want to read. Unlike other companies, like Viz Media or Yen Press, Vertical is very open to suggestion for licenses. Generally, folks start pouring on the love for very specific titles; public outcry has led to the licensure of Princess Knight, a Tezuka title that the manga blogging community has been asking for as long as I can remember.

Ed has asked for hits this year. With Chi’s Sweet Home and 7 Billion Needles wrapping up soon, Vertical wants more titles that hit it out of the park. I am happy to at least offer up some suggestions. My requests this year are a few fun and quirky titles that I think will do well in the current publishing arena. They also happen to be series I would love to read:

Kuragohime (Jellyfish Princess) is a josei title published in Kodansha‘s Kiss anthology, which is also home to Nodame Cantible. The manga is about a girl who is obsessed with jellyfish, who lives with other otaku in an all-women’s house. She avoids men and stylish people. When a stylish woman saves a precious jellyfish from death, she invites her back home, only to find out the “Stylish” is actually a man in drag. Hijinks ensue. While I wouldn’t normally expect a title like this to do very well, I adore the premise, and an 11-episode anime was just released in the USA (Released as Princess Jellyfish, which you can watch streaming here). Riding the coat-tails of the anime release could generate some sales for Vertical, so I think it’s a pretty smart choice right now.

My second request is a series that’s been running in Kodansha’s Weekly Morning, Uchū Kyōdai, written by Chūya Koyama. The series is about a two siblings who dream about becoming astronauts. One follows his dream, while the other goes on to be a businessman. After having a falling out with his boss at work and getting fired, the first brother now has an opportunity to chase his dream. This series has garnered two Manga Taisho awards, the first in 2009, and the second in 2010, and won the 56th Shogakukan Manga Awards in the category of best general manga.

What are your requests for Vertical?

Where All The Good Books At? My My Appraisal of Kodansha’s Release Slate

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When Kodansha first announced their slate of series that would be released this summer, I was excited. Here was a new company taking over from Del Rey, and since the manga was coming straight from the publisher, it would be easier to get more obscure titles, more josei and seinen, and other manga oddities into print. I was excited to see some of the work from Morning and Afternoon, and I was hopeful that Kodansha would exceed my expectations of Del Rey acting in their stead.

They released their announcements list in mid-December, and since then I’ve been doing a fair bit of investigation into Kodansha‘s announced title list. There are a few titles that were getting reprinting (which I will get to in a minute), but there were a slew of new titles that I had never heard of. Let’s take a second to review what we know (and my first impressions).

Cage of Eden and Bloody Monday, (two series I’ve already done workups on) look to be some of the stereotypical manga that Del Rey is/was known for; overly complicated shonen titles with plenty of fan service (see Negima!, in comparison). Both Bloody Monday and Cage of Eden promise something other than the shonen stories that dominate Viz‘s Shonen Jump lineup, but that does not necessarily make them good reading.

Little information is available about two of Kodansha‘s other series, Deltora Quest and Mardock Scramble. Deltora Quest is a completed ten volume shonen fantasy about an Evil Shadow Lord, Seven Magic Seals, and the giant battle between GOOD AND EVIL, which honestly just sounds like a bad The Dark Is Rising. Mardock Scramble is a bit of an enigma, since its promise of cyberpunk noir seems at least a bit more interesting than a bad redo of a Susan Cooper novel, but information is scant. We do know that Viz‘s Haikasoru imprint printed the novel this manga is based on. However, my experience with adaptations of previous series seems to indicate that this will probably not be all that great.

Other titles are similarly uninteresting. Animal Land by Mokoto Raiku, the author of Zatch Bell, looks pretty poor. I wasn’t a fan of Zatch Bell, and I doubt that this series will get much traction in the shonen community. Another Pheonix Wright, Ace Attorney manga is also going to print. Weeeeeee.

Monster Hunter Orage is probably the most interesting of the series announced, but only because it is written by Hiro Mashima, the author of Fairy Tail.

Until the Full Moon, which is a boy/boy romance about a half vampire/half werewolf is getting a reprint. It was originally printed by Broccoli Books back in 2005, with excellent production values and a high price tag. I’m not sure what this reprint is supposed to represent, but it is one of the only shojo series that Kodansha announced in December. I am sure that some look at Broccoli‘s releases with fondness, but that was quite some time ago. Many new manga readers have never even heard of Broccoli Books. While I am happy to see Kodansha bring back this title, which is both bizarre and interesting, I don’t know how well its old-school art will be handled by a new audience.

Likewise, it is good to see Gon getting reprinted, but this will be the third time the series has been printed, and there’s only so much Gon a guy can take.

If you couldn’t tell already, I am not that impressed with Kodansha‘s announced releases. They all seem like fine titles for a certain crowd, and I’m sure that they will sell copies. I just don’t see a whole lot of value in them.

I haven’t read any of these announced series, and so I can’t doom them to mediocrity immediately. It is not as if these series are all going to be bad, but all of them are very… predictable. In a shrinking market where all series need to pay for their costs, printing “safe” series makes for an adequate return on investment, and I suppose that’s what the business of comics is all about. Unlike Viz, which has Pokemon, Naruto, and Bleach to give them some extra funds with which to print more experimental titles, Kodansha does not have that built up business. Theoretically, they don’t have as much financial room to work with. Realistically, Kodansha can publish whatever it pleases, but we are discussing business here, and Kodansha is not necessarily in the “make Alex happy” business.

Kodansha has time to develop its properties and generate some sales this summer. I think it’s probably a bit hasty to ask them for miracles as soon as they come out of the gates – at the same time, if Kodansha is going to just print the same old Del Rey manga, there’s no reason to get excited about them printing titles like Drops of God or Saint Young Men.

Note: Thankfully, we have publishers like Vertical Inc. to publish Drops of God! Check out my reaction here!

Still, comics like Saint Young Men are the reason why I was excited that Kodansha was starting its own imprint in the USA to begin with. I suppose my expectations are a bit too high. I wanted more complex, adult series to be released here in the States, and I am a bit disappointed that we don’t have any evidence of that yet from Kodansha.

Manga Widget Investigates: Bloody Monday

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In this episode of MWI, we are back to looking at series Kodansha has announced it will  publish during the summer of 2011. Last time, we looked at Cage of Eden, a shonen survival thriller with lots of fan-service. This time, let’s take a look at another manga that started its print run in Weekly Shonen Magazine, and will be part of Kodansha‘s arrival to stores in the summer of 2011 – Bloody Monday.

Bloody Monday is shonen crime thriller – the main character is a young hacker who uses his talents to bring down unsavory people and criminals in the underworld. His father is an agent of an elite anti-terrorist government agency, and occasionally the main character gets to work on hacking and decrypting jobs for them. Because, you know, this shit actually happens in the real world, and junior-high and high school kids get consult work from shadowy government agencies.

The plot focuses on a terrorist organization that is trying to apparently destroy all of Japan, using biological warfare. This organization is both covert and overt in its actions, and concurrently frames our young hero’s father for murder and places a female operative into the student’s school as his new teacher to keep an eye on him. This is an interesting plot point, because while we can see the main character working to track down these terrorists, we also get to see him interact with the antagonist of the series as if she is an ally. Depending on the writing, this could be very interesting plot construction, or it could be absolutely awful.

This series will undoubtedly draw comparisons to Death Note, a very successful manga from Viz Media, and this is almost assuredly why Kodansha has decided to bring this title along with its first batch of new manga series. The idea is almost exactly the same, although in Death Note, the main character was actually the terrorist, which is the opposite of Bloody Monday. What made Death Note interesting was the way that Tsugumi Ohba wrote her intelligent characters. The major reason why Death Note was a good read was the way that these intelligent characters were put into situations where they could be intelligent and do some creative problem-solving. Whether or not Bloody Monday catches fire like Death Note did in the US will be up to the first volume and whether or not the authors of this series can create interesting space in which intelligent characters can interact.

One of the problems I have with manga like these is that the intelligent main character needs to remain the same intelligence throughout the manga. It is one thing if he or she gets stumped by some various problem, but it is another thing entirely if the character is brilliant in one moment and mind-blowingly stupid in the next. While Death Note was good about this in the beginning of the series, there were some instances, especially near the end, that made me wonder why Light was so… dumb. I’ve seen rumblings about Bloody Monday that this sort of thing is a frequent occurrence, which could spell doom for the series if its major fans are those who like smart mysteries.

Bloody Monday is obviously at least a bit successful in Japan, so it must be doing something right. The series started publication in 2007, and ended at volume 11, and has now started a second season, much in the same way that Rosario + Vampire started a new season after ten volumes. Bloody Monday Season 2 is up to three volumes, and is currently serialized in Weekly Shonen Magazine.

Whether or not Bloody Monday makes it to a second season in the US depends largely on how well this first run does, and we will find that out when Kodansha releases the first volume in August.

Manga Widget Investigates: Cage of Eden

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Generally, I use this blog as a way to showcase my reviews and opinions on the manga publishing business in the United States. One of my new year’s resolutions for this blog was to get a more in-depth look at the publishing business from both sides of the Pacific, to learn more about manga as it appears in its native format, and most importantly, to blog more often. This post (and any future posts like it) are an attempt to roll all these goals together. Let me know what you think in the comments!

I want to start the inaugural edition of Manga Widget Investigates with something that I have been thinking about for awhile now; Kodansha‘s arrival in the USA. The announcement that Kodansha was starting business as a solo venture in the USA was big news originally, but it seemed like all they did originally  was take back their licenses from Dark Horse and TokyoPop and reprint Dark Horse‘s translations of Ghost in the Shell and Akira. This obviously was met with some consternation from manga fans – surely they weren’t just going to try to reprint previous books, were they? Things got even worse when Del Rey lost all its licenses to Kodansha. For a time, I wondered whether or not I would ever get to read the 29th volume of Negima!

Now with Kodansha USA finally revealing some of its 2011 plans late last year, we have a chance to see what the company has been working on since Kodansha split with Del Rey as its publishing partner. As is to be expected, most of Del Rey‘s profitable line-up has been adopted for publication at Kodansha USA, but they did also announce a few new licenses that were being printed along with Del Rey‘s catalog. A subset of their shonen release announcements come from Weekly Shonen Magazine, Kodansha‘s equivalent to Shonen Jump.

The reason for this seems fairly simple; Weekly Shonen Magazine is the source for a lot of the previously published manga through Del Rey: Fairy Tail, Mahou Sensei Negima!, Code: Breaker, and Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle are all series from Weekly Shonen Magazine that have done well in North America. Additional notable series to grace the pages of Weekly Shonen Magazine include Love Hina, Akita no Joe, Rave Master, GetBackers, and Samurai Deeper Kyo. When Del Rey‘s biggest financial hitters were all published in the same magazine, it seems intuitive to try to get the next big hit with another series from Weekly Shonen Magazine. Enter stage left: Cage of Eden.

Cage of Eden (or Eden no Ori) is a survival-themed manga that is currently running in Weekly Shonen Magazine, The book focuses on a group of students on an airplane back to Japan from a field trip to Guam. Due to some mysterious cause, the plane crashes, and although the emergency landing leaves most of the people on board alive, the island they land on is full of strange, prehistoric beasts, all willing to prey on unsuspecting humans.

Cage of Eden has been described by some as a mix between Lord of the Flies and Land of the Lost, which sounds like pretty good fiction, provided it is done right. Representatives from Kodansha also said at its license announcement that the series had a bit of a Negima! flavor to it, which, translated into regular English, means the series is going to have unabashed fan service mixed in with the trials and tribulations of survival fiction. Whatever Cage of Eden is doing, it is doing it right; the series started in 2008 and is still being serialized. Currently Cage of Eden is up to ten volumes in print in Japan.

Yoshinobu Yamada, the writer of Cage of Eden, seems like he’s done the survival genre before. His first series, EX-Shounen Hyouryuu (Young Castaways) ran for five volumes for the same anthology. His other work includes a Kendo shonen piece called Chanbara which ran for two volumes in 2003.

Cage of Eden isn’t the only manga coming from Weekly Shonen Magazine. The new series Bloody Monday, which began publication in 2007, is currently in its “second season” in the magazine (much like Season Two of Rosario + Vampire).

However good or bad Cage of Eden is, we can expect to see it hit shelves in August of 2011. Whether or not people like boobs, butts, and panty shots with their Lord of the Flies remains to be seen.

Kodansha Finally Hopping Into US Market?

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Well, this is a shock.

TokyoPop has just announced that Kodansha, one of the large manga publishers in Japan, has denied the renewal of all licenses of properties they own. That means that series like Chobits, Love Hina, GetBackers, and Rave Master have all had their publishing rights returned to Kodansha, and that TokyoPop will no longer be able to publish these series. Plus, any series currently in publication can’t be finished if they’re from Kodansha, which may be a bit of a blow for the indie manga publisher. TokyoPop was looking for some upturn this year, and things were looking pretty good up until now – although, I’m not quite sure what series T-Pop is publishing currently which have to end mid-release.

The one thing this reminds me of, as Brigid astutely points out, is Kodansha pulling its licenses from TokyoPop Germany last year. With Viz’s parent companies buying up two of the major manga and anime publishing companies in Europe, perhaps Kodansha taking back it’s licenses from TokyoPop indicates its final introduction to the US and European markets as a publisher, instead of acting through intermediaries. If that is the case, we should be seeing some sort of proof from the publishing business here soon.

I do feel pretty bad for the folks at T-Pop though. They were just starting to bounce back. Hopefully their new licenses will be able to get them on their feet, and that this setback isn’t too major.

Musings on Kodansha’s International Business

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As we heard across the interwebs at the tail end of last week, Kodansha has pulled all of TokyoPop’s liscences in Germany. Kodansha, did not, however, pull any of the liscences for any other company publishing in Germany, or in any other region, as far as we know. This has some obvious implications, some of which, I want to talk about.

We were promised a new publisher in the US around July of 2008; Kodansha was setting up shop here in the States, bringing along its manga properties and doing who knows what to Del Rey in the process. This new imprint never materialized, however, and many of us have been questioning whether Kodansha’s move into foreign waters was a flop,  or if they held off because of bad economic conditions.

It could be, however, that they’re slow-rolling the lot of us.

Manga in Germany is published mainly by TokyoPop and Carlsen, the later being a subsidiary to a privately owned Dutch company. For Kodansha to pull all of their liscences from T-Pop, they must have some sort of plan for the geographic location; companies do not simply cut off revenue streams for no apparent reason. This could mean a few things, one of which is that Kodansha is setting up a German wing to its publishing business. It could also mean that it’s transfering its liscences to another publishing house, such as Carlsen. It could also mean that Kodansha lacks faith in the financial stability of TokyoPop, although that theory doesn’t hold a lot of water, considering that their liscences would all revert back to them if T-Pop did go belly under.

So, what does all this mean for the USA? Well, as of right now, not a whole lot. Nothing across the pond has changed. However (and this is a pretty big however); this business move means that things are about to change. With a loss of some hot properties from its German publishing wing, will T-Pop be able to handle this new bit of stress? And what is Kodansha’s gameplan?

We’ll find out soon enough, I think.